One can divide much of Crawford’s poetry into four
categories: short poems about New England; longer
narrative poems in blank verse; religious poems;
and love poems. The first two categories hold up nicely,
despite their forced residence in the shadow
of Robert Frost, and Crawford’s religious poems
are unusual in that they are lovely, clearly heartfelt,
and not the least bit preachy. But Crawford
really distinguishes himself in his love poems....

Before
settling in Chester, New Hampshire, where he teaches poetry at Chester
College, Robert Crawford spent over a decade working, as he puts it,
“in and around” the Pentagon. His experiences in Washington, DC
appear to have had little discernible impact on the poet. In the
collection’s opening poem, “Town Roads,” the speaker ruminates on
different ways of organizing knowledge, and the poem may thus provide
some hints of Crawford’s perspective on the Beltway mentality.
The speaker explains that roads in New England change their names at
each town line to indicate the town from which they come. A
Washington insider might find this proliferation of names offensive to
a bureaucrat’s sense of order:

What these towns need is a
Copernicus
To tell them that the center lies
without,
And agencies to legislate that
roads
That run between them share a
common name.

Crawford does not dismiss this notion out of
hand. Rather, he sees an alternative, a “possibility”:

Perhaps
The towns were right. All
roads don’t lead to Rome;
They do, however, radiate from
home.

As far as I can tell, Copernican proposals do not recur in this
collection. But these poems clearly radiate from Crawford’s New
England home.
One can divide much of Crawford’s poetry into four
categories: short poems about New England; longer narrative poems in
blank verse; religious poems; and love poems. The first two
categories hold up nicely, despite their forced residence in the shadow
of Robert Frost, and Crawford’s religious poems are unusual in that
they are lovely, clearly heartfelt, and not the least bit
preachy. But Crawford really distinguishes himself in his love
poems, and so it seems sensible to begin there.
One might wish Crawford had stayed in Washington a
bit longer, if only in the hope that he could teach master classes to
the likes of Scooter Libby, William Safire, and G. Gordon Liddy on how
to write effective sex scenes. Those prosaic politicos’ approach
to eroticism in literature is the frontal attack: “[She] bit his neck,
plunged her head between his legs and devoured him” (Safire); “T’sa Li
froze, her lips still enclosing Rand’s glans . . .” (Liddy); “He held
her breasts in his hands. Oddly, he thought, the lower one might
be larger. . . .” (Libby). Crawford accomplishes what these
writers cannot without ever describing a sex act.
With two poems, “French Braids” and “At the Top of
the Stairs,” Crawford establishes himself, in this, his first
collection of poems, as a master of the erotic sonnet. These
poems illustrate and illuminate the vital tension between what the two
poems alternatively name “restraint” and “release” and “resistance and
release” that is at the heart of both eroticism and literature.
“French Braids” describes a lover’s desire to
simultaneously admire and unbind his partner’s braided hair:

While one hand is content to
touch, admire
A balanced, careful
weave—preserve for viewing
The beauty and the boundaries of
desire—
The other hand is busy at undoing.

While these opening lines follow a familiar ABAB
pattern, the next eight lines of the sonnet follow a more eccentric
path, CDECDECD, with the “D” incorporating the slant rhyme of
composure/over/closure. As the poem is not divided into stanzas,
the effect of this rhyme pattern is to suggest that restraint is losing
the battle against release. The sonnet’s turn, conventionally
placed in line 9, is here deferred to line 11, suggesting the
prolongation of arousal. In thus simultaneously exploiting and
resisting the sonnet form, Crawford demonstrates the eroticism of form
itself. When aesthetic pleasure in order finally capitulates
entirely to the erotic, the poem provides a release that is the
literary equivalent of a sexual climax:

Your urgent kiss decides which
hand is played.
A gentle pull brings argument to
closure.
Surprised, my hands attempt to
catch your hair;
It falls the way the rain lets go
the air.

The lovely closing couplet is not without its own
tensions. The hands, treated as independent actors throughout the
poem, now suddenly work in unison at the behest of a first-person
speaker who makes his first appearance in the couplet. The rhyme
pattern is now conventional. In short, Crawford expresses the
moment of fullest release as consonant with strict observance of form
and also as a moment of heightened consciousness, when the body’s
parts, once acting as if of their own will, are now subservient of mind.
“At the Top of the Stairs” is similar in subject
matter but more orthodox in form. A Petrarchan sonnet, with very
few metrical substitutions, the poem has a more settled quality to it
than “French Braids.” One surmises that we are at a different
stage in a love relationship. If “French Braids” describes the
passions of a new relationship, “At the Top of the Stairs” describes
those of one that has endured. The speaker of the poem is told
that “War and Peace / can
wait” by a lover who, with a kiss, puts all
thoughts of reading to rest. Here again, the prelude to
love-making is described in terms that also, at least in part, describe
the poet’s process of composition.

The buttons on your jeans each
come undone,
A fumble here or there, but, one
by one,
Each one worked free—resistance
and release.

Unlike “French Braids,” in which the poet is
completely absorbed in the sexual encounter that the poem describes,
“At the Top of the Stairs” recognizes that passion comes in interludes,
and that the lovers will resume their lives after the erotic urge
subsides.

Across the hall, a turned down
bed awaits;
The jeans can stay till morning
where they land.

It is fitting that a poem in which the closing lines
anticipate a return to the life outside of passion should be so
restrained by the Petrarchan form. Here, resistance and release
is heightened not by a postponement of the sonnet’s turn but by the
poem’s acknowledgment (both through its language and its form) that
life resists our desires at every turn, and thus enjoyment of (sexual)
pleasure is always circumscribed by structures, be they clothing (the
lover’s jeans) or work (the speaker’s need to read War and Peace) or
the demands of finding words that both satisfy the form and render
thought as art. The book includes other fine love poems,
including “The Whole of It,” “By a Window,” “Cosmography,” and “To
Unlearn Love,” each of which repays reading and re-reading, but modern
sonnets do not get much better than “French Braids” and “At the Top of
the Stairs.”
There may be no better way to illustrate why these
are such powerful poems than to contrast them with a much less
successful sonnet. “Millay’s Child” displays Crawford’s wonted
control of meter, rhyme and poetic diction. The main problem with
the poem is the lack of subtlety in its argument. Its speaker
“speculate[s]” on why Millay drank an abortifacient prepared by her
mother in order to induce a miscarriage. Was she forced by need,
regret?

No, I suspect it had to do with
beauty;
You feared—since Eros, your best
muse, resigns
When Wednesday’s play turns into
Thursday’s duty—
An interruption of your lovely
lines; . . .

From the opening line: “I speculate on why you
poisoned him," the poet has staked out a position, one that is neither
modulated nor refined with further reading. The rhetorical force
of giving the fetus a gender is muted somewhat with a parenthetical:
“(or her, who knew?),” but the language here is so awkward that it
merely raises suspicions that “him” was chosen for the sake of rhyme,
or for the sake of the poem’s argument that the fetus be granted the
status of a child. The poem’s supposition that Millay might have
feared a mere “interruption” of her poetry is inconsistent with other
lines of the poem that imagine that Millay’s concern was a “gray,
care-worn face, the wrinkles clearer— / Those mortal faults
highlighted by a child.” In short, these lines suggest that
Millay aborted her fetus not because she feared an interruption of her
work but the surrender of her
work and her life to the child.
Unlike the tensions between resistance and release in the love poems
discussed above, the inconsistency of argument in “Millay’s Child” does
not render the poem more interesting; it merely renders it confused.
To be fair, Crawford has taken on a challenging
subject. Poems
about abortion are hard to pull off. But the key ingredient to
any effective political poem that is not a satire has got to be some
degree of empathy for the people involved, with due deference to the
subject’s complexity — which, one would think, is what renders it
worthy of the poet’s comment. Does Crawford really want to weigh
in on the abortion debate to say only that Millay aborted her fetus out
of vanity? And this based on speculation and suspicion?
In fact, not much speculation is necessary.
Crawford’s poem seems to be inspired by Nancy Milford’s biography of
Millay, Savage Beauty.
As Milford explains, Millay was a single
woman living abroad when she got pregnant in 1922. She apparently
entertained hopes of marrying the father of the child, a Frenchman
named Daubigny. One of Millay’s friends at the time described
Daubigny as “a pseudo-aristocrat who did nothing.” Millay’s
mother’s estimate of the man was less ambiguous:

He slinks like a whipped cur when
he sees me. He acts as
if he had shit in his breeches .
. . . Of course, he knows how
I feel toward him. He has
even acknowledged that he does
not blame me, the slithering
whelp! The spineless jelly-fish.

Whatever his virtues or faults, Daubigny seems not
to have shared Millay’s hopes for their relationship, since one week
after procuring the documents necessary for marriage, Millay left
France accompanied only by her mother.
Clearly factors other than vanity likely influenced
Millay’s decision to end her pregnancy. One would expect more
sympathy from Crawford since, after all, Eros is his best muse as
well. The sad thing about “Millay’s Child” is that it threatens
to taint the entire volume with its determined misogyny. After
reading it, one returns to the love poems to ascertain whether Too Much Explanation Can Ruin a Man
contains any poems that portray women in a positive light and as
something other than objects of desire. Fortunately, as we shall
see in turning to the narrative poems, it does.
Crawford’s narrative, blank verse poems are
reminiscent of Frost in the most positive sense: the strongest of them
could easily be mistaken for poems written by Robert Frost. The
characters seem familiar — laconic, focused on their work, reserved in
their relationships. Many of the events crucial to the poems
occur, as it were, off-stage. The poems relate simple narratives
in blank verse that manages to capture the cadences of ordinary
speech. Like Frost’s great narrative poems, Crawford’s poems have
the compression of a short story — and then some. Even when
addressing Frostian themes, however, Crawford remains a love
poet. In these poems, he expresses not only sensual love, but
love of place.
In “The Road Agent,” the speaker recounts how his
wife meets him at the door “so I / Would know some news for me that
couldn’t wait.” The news, it turns out, is that an acquaintance,
Clarence Ward, had come by, campaigning for the position of Road
Agent. “Well, it is the only job worth having here,” is the man’s
initial reply. The woman recounts her conversation with Mr. Ward,
imitating his voice and mannerisms in a way that makes clear that she
does not take the job of Road Agent nearly as seriously as Mr. Ward —
or
her husband. But her body language reveals that she has more
news to tell:

“And that was all?”

“I wish it was the end,
But the way he stood, and that
earnest voice of his
So full of this concern for
cracks and holes—
It may have been the way the
light was falling
Behind him in the street, I just
don’t know—
It made me laugh.”

“You laughed at him out loud?”

And all I could think of was her
laugh and how,
On some days, you know, of all
the loves,
Why this one.

She took the flowers from my hand.

“If you see Clarence, tell him I
meant no harm.”

The echoes of Frost’s “Death of a Hired Man” are
unmistakable, but in a way that sheds interesting interpretive light on
both poems and on both poets. In Frost’s poem, it is the wife who
warns, “You mustn’t laugh at him.” In both poems, the women are
distracted at crucial moments by light. Frost’s Mary notices as
the moon’s “light poured softly in her lap. She saw it / And
spread her apron to it.” That moonlight seems to fortify Mary and
enables her to come to the crux of her argument with her husband.
In Crawford’s poem, the wife blames the play of light behind the Road
Agent for her laughter. Frost’s light brings tenderness;
Crawford’s light is harsher, and that harsh light reveals an absurdity
of New England life. The reader has no difficulty understanding
the reason for the wife’s laughter and the husband, while recognizing
that the job of a Road Agent is the most desirable in town, is in no
position to argue.
Tellingly, a short rumination on love intrudes in
Crawford’s poem — and
may indeed be the central interest of the poem in the end — while
Frost’s poem centers on a disagreement between the couple as to the
meaning of “home.” Crawford reveals so much in this short
exchange and the husband’s abbreviated ruminations on it, one could
spend a beneficial classroom hour unpacking it — especially with the
aid
of other Crawford poems, like “A Thing It’s Not” and “An Abandoned
Garden,” which show that Crawford, though not born in New England,
knows the New England mind very well. The wife in the poem knows
that she should not have laughed at the earnest Road Agent, but still
she could (or would) not suppress her laughter. Indeed, the wife
has not internalized the New England frame of mind. She goes
through the motions of apology to mollify her husband, but that done,
she takes the flowers from his hand and resumes her day. Having
chastised her with his incredulousness, the husband now silently
receives her command to tell Clarence that she meant no harm.
Both know that this is what he must do in order to be true to his two
loves — his wife and the mores of New England.
In “A Walk Home,” the speaker comes across a
neighbor struggling home with a load of books. Crawford seems to
be poking fun at himself as a New England poet. The books include
“a tome on sink repair,” a complete collection of Shakespeare’s works
and “heavier books by Stephen King.” Crawford repeatedly calls
attention to the famous New England reticence. “We walked in
silence side by side— / As good friends walk.” After a brief
conversation, which is, once again, a poignant love poem set in blank
verse, the speaker of the love poem takes his leave: “Have we said
enough? / I must be heading right and home. Good night.”
The theme recurs in “Passing,” which relates a much
less comfortable walk with another man of few words:

He kept in silence down the path,
while I
Kept coming up with something I
might say;
If wishing could not make him go
away,
I hoped that he could bear the
quiet less.

I folded first.

And so the two exchange a few sentences.
Reflecting on the encounter, the poet concludes, “I was glad we met /
In passing.” The line break is brilliant. The encounter has
been enough to re-establish contact between two men who have some
quarrel, and that was all that was needed. A longer encounter
might well have been unpleasant, but among men of few words, a few
words may be just the ticket.
It is nice to see Crawford winking a bit at the
tradition of New England poetry. A man who undertakes to write
formal poetry about New England must acknowledge his debts and his
burdens. Crawford does so boldly in “Repetition”:

The ground is covered in three
feet of snow.
This is a landscape good for
repetition:
Walk anywhere within the woods,
walk slow,
Walk fast, try to escape the
admonition
That “everything’s been done
before, you know.”

And so, Crawford covers ground well-trod by his
great predecessors, Frost and Robinson, and finds new things to say on
familiar themes, as in his rumination on a wall in “A Row of Stones”
and on neighbors in “A Neighbor in Spring.” Too Much
Explanation Can Ruin a Man includes a few short poems on
religious subjects. They do not venture far from Crawford’s chief
strength; they are love poems. “Salisbury Cathedral” marvels at
the “tons of marble resting on this bog” and concludes:

The single spire celebrates,
above,
Their faith the ground could bear
this weight of love.

Love is also the theme of Crawford’s Christmas poem,
“The Love of One.” This poem catalogues the overkill of
Christmas: wreaths, decorations, and above all “A thousand lights to
celebrate / Redundantly, the love of one.” Crawford acknowledges
the cross-fertilization that occurs between his love poems and his
religious poems in a clever bit of light verse called “Confession”:

That poem I said I wrote to God;
It wasn’t.
I said it went beyond the flesh;
It doesn’t.
Your speculation on the “you”—
Denied.
I told you that it was His touch;
I lied.

This poem illustrates what happens when one explains too much.Too Much
Explanation Can Ruin a Man is a very strong debut by a poet of
great talent and promise. The poems rarely venture far from the
well-traveled New England roads of snow and ice, but from what Crawford
teaches of desire, I venture he is one who favors fire.